How did we ever get to the place where we support missionaries all over the world who never preach the gospel? If you want to know what a biblical missionary looks like, read Acts 20. Jail, violence, or death never deterred New Testament missionaries (or Old Testament prophets) from boldly preaching the whole counsel of God.

One rumor I keep hearing is that Muslims around the world are frequently having dreams of a “figure of light” which is leading them to belief in Jesus. And perhaps they are having these dreams. Well, how convenient! I guess that let’s us off the hook for our cowardice in not preaching the gospel to them because we were afraid of what might happen to us. Or might there be another explanation for these dreams? Who is described in the Bible as disguising themselves as “an angel of light?” (2 Corinthians 11:14) Are those who have these dreams being brought to an awareness of their sins resulting in repentance and the death of self so they can be born again? Or are they just becoming enamored of a mystical experience? Could it be that these dreams are actually laying the ground work for the Antichrist and the False Prophet who will declare themselves to be the embodiment of these dreams? Nah...I’m sure it’s just Jesus revealing himself directly to them so we don’t have to suffer for preaching the gospel...

But this new breed of “secret missionary” is the inevitable result of our whole-hearted embrace of Relationship Evangelism. I wrote about it almost a year ago (http://www.cyshift.com/secret.html) so I won’t repeat it here. But you may want to check it out.

If you want to know one reason why we must boldly proclaim the Gospel, you might want to listen to the self-proclaimed atheist Penn Jillette of the comedy duo Penn & Teller (courtesy of Steve Camp at stevenjcamp.blogspot.com). When you have an atheist telling us Christians why we need to evangelize more, it should shame us all. Here’s a quote:

“If you believe that there's a heaven and hell and people could be going to hell or not getting eternal life or whatever, and you think that well it's not really worth telling them this because it would make it socially awkward... How much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?”